Dead Sea (28 page)

Crycek started tittering. “All the little puppets in a row,” he said in a dry, ragged voice. “Doing what they’re told to do. You’re all so fucking stupid, every one of you. And especially you, Saks, you’re the dumbest little puppet of all.
He’s
out there, watching and listening, getting stronger as we get weaker. Only it isn’t a
him,
it’s a
they,
a
them.
Them ones hiding in the fog, they’re the ones that pull your strings and make you dance and you, you silly fucking little man, you let them! You let them! They own your mind, they make you walk and talk and hate and kill … you’re the stupidest one of all!
The stupidest!”

“Shut your goddamn hole!” Saks ordered him, pulling the gun out of Menhaus’ back and aiming it right at Crycek’s staring face. Right at that sallow mask with the crooked, lunatic grin.

But Crycek just shook his head. “I don’t have to shut up and I won’t shut up! They already own you, but my mind is my own. They can’t get in my head because I won’t let them in there, won’t let them get fat sitting in their web sucking the juices of my mind dry!” He pressed the tips of his fingers to his temples. “I make my own decisions, do you hear? Not you and not them!”

“You’re goddamn nuts,” Saks told him.

But Crycek assured him that he was completely in control of his faculties. He dared Saks to shoot him, because he didn’t honestly believe that those bullets
would
kill him. “It might look like they did and it might look like I die … but will I? Or is it just something they’ve planted in your little mind? Is that even a gun you hold, Saks?” He started giggling afresh, wiping spit off his chin with the back of his hand. “Think about it, Saks! Go ahead, think about what I say! This might be your last chance! For all you know, for all you
really
know, you might be alone right now. Lost in this hungry fog all alone … and you just
think
we’re here. We might have all gone down with the ship … just ghosts, memories. C’mon, Saks, close your eyes,
when you open them we won’t be here … ghosts..”

“SHUT UP!” Saks roared, unable to listen to that droning, insane voice any more. He could feel Crycek up there, in his head, like dirty fingers sorting around, making him think things and feel things, filling his mind with lies and doubts. “YOU BETTER SHUT THE FUCK UP IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”

But Crycek just giggled. “Can you
feel
them, Saks? Can you feel them up there draining you dry?
Sucking your mind away?”

Saks was trying to sort it out, because none of it was true. It couldn’t be true. It was all madness what Crycek was saying. There was nothing out in that fog, no devil, no evil presence that ate minds. And … and in the boat, Cook and Fabrini and Crycek were there. They were not ghosts, because if they were ghosts that would mean that Saks himself was the crazy one. Talking to shadows. It would mean that he was by himself out there, that he was
totally alone …

So Saks did what came natural to him.

He pulled the trigger on the Browning. The shot rang out and the bullet passed harmlessly over Crycek’s head. And that shut him up. It didn’t wipe that smirk off his face, but it sure as hell shut him up. The others weren’t saying much either, just staring with those sweaty, sooty faces. Accusing faces.

Finally, Fabrini said, “Nice try, Crycek. It almost worked.”

But you could see from the look on Crycek’s face that it had not been a ruse. He believed everything he had said.

“Next one goes right between your eyes, Crycek.” Saks had calmed now, but still looked a little confused. He put the gun back on Menhaus. “Okay … you said Cook and Cook it’s gonna be. You sure now?”

“I’m sure.”

Saks raised the gun and took aim.

And then Menhaus made his move.

It happened fast.

As Saks took aim Menhaus moved with a speed he’d thought abandoned him years ago. Saks hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t even remotely expected it. He probably just assumed Menhaus would curl up and pout. And that was his mistake. Menhaus threw his body against Saks, upsetting his aim and knocking him into the gunwale. The gun went off, but the bullet went into the sky. And then Menhaus had his hands on it, struggling against Saks. Saks kicked him in the stomach, in the thigh, but he would not let go.

By then, Cook and Fabrini were at his side.

Fabrini punched Saks in the face about four or five times while Cook and Menhaus wrestled the gun away.

The fight gone out of him, Saks let it go and sunk to the deck plating. Used up and empty, all the hot air gone now like somebody had bled him empty.

He did not look at them or even speak.

Cook took the gun to the bow where it would be out of harm’s way.

Fabrini took the knife from Saks’s boot while Menhaus held him.

It was all over very quickly.

“There,” Fabrini said, giving Saks a good kick in the ribs. “There you are, asshole. What’re you going to do now?”

Saks just stared at him, his face smeared with blood.

“I’m going to kill you,” Saks said and dove at him.

The three of them managed to put down Saks’s latest rebellion without too much trouble. But they knew now that he was too far gone to reason with. He had to be tied up. They used Fabrini’s belt. They knotted his arms behind his back and threaded the belt through an oarlock, knotting it again. At last, Saks was harmless. He wouldn’t hurt them or himself now.

But it was pathetic, Cook thought, having to do something like that in the first place.

What was it all coming to?

“At least, at least now we can breathe, now we can relax,” Menhaus said, still not sounding so sure of it. “We can figure out things … maybe get out of here.”

“There’s no getting out,” Crycek said. “Not yet, maybe not ever. We’re drifting … can’t you feel it? We’re being drawn deeper into this place.”

He had a point and nobody dismissed it. Where before the weeds had been in isolated little patches and clumps drifting about, now there were great banks of them. The water was still open for the most part, but the islands of weed were so huge you couldn’t see where they ended. They just faded off into the mist like headlands. And they were massive and thick, steaming and verdant and stinking of jungle swamps.

“He’s right, you know. Crycek. We’re all going to die,” Saks said almost cheerfully. “Each and every one of us. Look at those weeds … sooner or later they’re gonna snare us up and that’ll be all she wrote.”

“Shut the hell up,” Fabrini said.

“You better shoot me if you want to shut me up,” Saks told him.

It looked like Fabrini was indeed considering it.

“Maybe … maybe some day the weeds will part and this lifeboat’ll drift out same way we drifted in … except there’ll be five skeletons in it. It’s happened before. A whole ship one time … went missing three years, then it just showed up one day and-”

“Want me to gag him?” Fabrini asked.

Cook seemed to be in charge now. He was the most level-headed one of the bunch. “I don’t know. We’ll leave it up to Saks. Why do you say, dumb ass, do we have to gag you or are you gonna be a good boy?”

Saks went quiet, but you couldn’t wipe the look of grim certainty off his face or erase the mad dog glare of insanity from his eyes. These were constants. Things the others had to pretend they weren’t seeing. But it was no simple matter to look lunacy in the eye and ignore its ramifications. To know, deep down, that under the right conditions, it could take anyone, anytime.

And no one knew this better than Cook.

Nobody in the world.

He’d felt it that day he’d killed his father. The blinding, white-hot, ice-cold slow burn that was true madness, whether temporary or permanent. And until you experienced it, tasted it, filled your belly with it, you could never appreciate it or how ugly it all really was. Because once you’d tasted it, you never got that awful flavor out of your mouth.

Cook didn’t like the idea of being in charge. He would have preferred a very democratic sort of leadership, a council made up of him and Fabrini and Menhaus. Maybe even Crycek because now and then he made sense. But it wasn’t going to be that way. Surely Fabrini was tougher and more physically able than he. Menhaus had been around more, had more experience. And Crycek … if he wasn’t so loopy … he was an experienced sailor. Yet, they seemed to be looking to Cook for leadership. He seemed to have the final say whether he liked it or not.

But all he really wanted was to sleep.

He was dead tired … yet he didn’t dare close his eyes. He had to watch Saks and watch him close. If trouble was going to come, it would come from his direction.

At least, that’s what Cook was thinking.

And then something hit the boat.

And then hit it again.

Soltz was pretty certain about it. “I know what I heard,” he told Gosling and the others. “It was a gunshot. My hearing is more acute than yours. I know what I heard.”

George had heard something, too. They all had. A sort of muted cracking in the distance. It could have been a gunshot … but it could have been a lot of other things, too.

“Maybe we ought to get on that radio,” Cushing suggested. “See what we can pick up … somebody might have been trying to signal us.”

Gosling considered it. George knew very well what he was thinking, how he didn’t like the idea of listening to that static. It got to a man and particularly when you had that odious sense that it was not just static, but something alive and aware.

“That’s what we should do,” Soltz said.

Gosling looked to George and he just shrugged. What else could he do?

Gosling went up to the bow where all the survival equipment was stowed in waterproof, zippered compartments. He took out the VHF and began to set it up.

George stayed by the doorway, watching.

The others went with Gosling and George just sat there, thinking, thinking about what he’d seen coming out of the fog earlier. Even now, it left him with a dread sense of horror. Something like that, it got under your skin and stayed there like mites. The image of that horrible little girl … he couldn’t shake it nor the idea of what she might have done to him.

He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. She had been there, all right. But where did that leave him … believing in ghosts?

No, absolutely not,
he told himself,
I do not believe in ghosts and spooks. I didn’t believe in them before I was lost in this terrible place and I don’t believe in them now.

But if she hadn’t been a ghost, then what?

This is what George had been threading through the reels of his brain ever since it happened. She had been dressed in what he thought was 19
^th
century clothing. He figured he wasn’t too far off there. He rather doubted that if it was all a hallucination, that his mind would have conjured up such convincing antique fashions. And it had been convincing … her hair, her dress, everything. He’d been around and around on this and he kept coming back to the same thing: the little girl was not a ghost, not really, it was just something else pretending to be the ghost of a little girl.

It was no less spookier than the ghost bit, but it made sense.

Because George could remember, right before it happened, thinking he saw something moving out there and his mind had been filled with images of ghost ships and spooks rising from their watery graves. Just imagination … but something out there, maybe his hypothetical Fog-Devil, had read his mind and gave him that which would scare him the most.

It was an aberrant line of thinking … yet he almost believed it.

The dead sea … for that’s how he thought of this place, as in Dead Sea, proper noun … was filled with horrible things. But most of them were merely biology run wild, but this
other,
this Fog-Devil … the presence he sensed out in that static … maybe it was the original boogeyman, a thing that knew what scared you, pulled it raw and dripping from your mind and set it loose. Maybe it got off doing that. Maybe it was the very thing that had haunted not only this sea but dozens of others, the very thing that terrified sailors since men first took to the water. The thing that created ghost ships and sea demons and crawling, nameless things that scared sailors to death or became the stuff of legend.

Fantasy? Maybe, but it would explain some things, wouldn’t it? George did not think it created monster eels or schools of weird luminous fish or odd little leggy critters that sat on oars-things like that were nature’s creations, a seriously fucked-up and alien nature, but nature all the same. No, whatever this thing was, it was not so crude in its creativity, it was not so general. When it scared someone, it made things personal, intimate.

Just as it had with George.

George started getting the creeps looking into the fog and thinking these things, so he joined the others up front. The VHF was operating and Gosling was sending out signals. The static was rising and falling with an almost morphic sound that made you want to sleep. And dream.

“What is that?” Soltz was saying. “What am I hearing there? That pinging, shrilling sound in there …”

George had heard it before. A high-pitched pinging like that of a tuning fork, but barely discernable in the static. It came and went. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, a code, something. You’d hear that pinging, then there would be a strange buzzing pulse that rose up and died. But each time George heard it, he was certain there was a pattern to it. That it was not random and certainly not natural in origin.

“Just noise,” Gosling said. “Atmospheric noise.”

That sounded good and maybe Cushing and Soltz were buying it, but George certainly wasn’t. For there was direction behind those sounds, there was intelligence. Something was making them and he honestly didn’t want to know what it was.

“I guess,” Cushing began, “I guess it’s just some weird interference … that’s what it must be.”

“Sure,” Gosling said, but his voice sounded awfully hollow.

If it indeed was static, what they heard next certainly could not be. It happened about three or four minutes later, just about the time Gosling was going to shut the unit off, that static beginning to bother all of them in ways they could scarcely fathom. It started out as a low, distorted whining like a shortwave radio trying to lock on a channel and then it grew high and echoing, became something like a broken up voice full of panic that was saying,
“… help us … oh God help us … it’s getting close now … it’s getting close … oh dear God …”
It faded away and then came back clearer, so clear you could hear the man on the other end breathing and something in the background, a huge and booming sound getting louder and louder. It almost sounded like a great, hollow heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom.
“… anyone can hear us … it’s … it’s coming out of the fog… it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and … it’s knocking at the door … at the door …”